Stop Biting Your Tongue Out

a ramble about sleep.

Photo by Shane on Unsplash

There is nothing in the world that I love more than sleep. My favorite sleep is that sleep where you are so tired that you just get pulled as if by gravity down into slumber. It’s pretty rare for me and when it happens it is just the best.

I’ve had trouble sleeping since I was a child. My earliest memory is laying in bed watching the light from under the door and trying to be quiet so no one knew I was awake.

My dad took me on a cruise when I was in kindergarten and I couldn’t sleep for days and he gave me an Ambien and I started to hallucinate and the ship's doctor had to come and take care of me.

When I was in high school I finally went and got a sleep test and was given a prescription for ambient which I then immediately started to abuse. A few car crashes and a stint in rehab later, I was in college and blacklisted from that entire class of drug.

Ambien does something to me that no other drug does. It makes me manic. But like, really manic. It kills my short terms memory and makes me feel like God. It does this to a small number of people, but for the most part, it’s hard to explain. Everyone knows that there are cases of people taking ambient and doing weird stuff in their sleep, but ambient doesn’t make me tired. It makes me very energetic and silences all the doubts in my head. It’s what ecstasy must be like to some other people.

But Ambien has almost killed me a few times now, not in an overdose sense, but in a “you are losing your life” sense. I went to rehab at 18 for it and then was clean until 2016 when a coworker who didn’t know better gave me one for sleep and a few months later I was ordering them from India and blacked out all day.

C’est la vie.

So I don’t take Ambien anymore!